Forum Discussion
Solved
What´s the reason that I can´t delete chats
Does anybody know why it is not pssible to delete old chats?
Hello there Sophie_Bruehl
The truth is that you can't delete old chats, this is what we call "by-design". There’s no option to delete a full chat in Microsoft Teams. But you should be able to delete or edit your own messages.
What you can right now, are the following options:
- Deleting a single chat message on Microsoft Teams- Hiding the chat: Hiding a chat keeps it out of your way on Teams. To hide a chat, right-click on the chat name, and click hide. Once you hide the chat, it only shows up again when someone sends a new message to it. You can also bring the chat back by searching for a participant’s name or the chat in your search box. Right-click on the chat and choose to unhide to see it again.
- Muting the chat: You can also mute a chat if you’re sure you don’t want to hear from it again. You’ll still be in the conversation when you mute a chat but won’t receive notifications. Right-click the chat and choose the mute option. You can then hide the chat, too if you like. Right-click and click unmute to receive notifications again.
If you’re worried about long-term chat archives, you can check your admin settings. Teams chat, file, and channel information is saved indefinitely by default on Teams. You can change retention policies in the Microsoft 365 compliance center.
When you set a retention policy for Teams, you can choose which information you keep. Your policy will allow you to:
- Retain Teams messages for a specific period then delete it
- Delete Teams chats or channel messages after a specific duration.Last but not least, you can vote on the UserVoice for this feature to come out as soon as possible - the posts with more votes, get more attention for the backend/design team.
Some examples here for this "delete chat feature": https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/41353873-delete-chat-conversations ; https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/40870207-delete-chat ; https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/41461267-delete-chat-message
Hope this helps 🙂
It looks like it is an option now, but only for Home & Small Business:
From Delete a chat in Teams for personal and small business use (microsoft.com)
Which almost makes sense; workplaces, education, & government would want retention to be subject to compliance policies & not the individual employee/student
...except I presumed deleting a chat only deletes it from the end-users client, because it could exists in the hidden Teams folder in everyone's mailbox, and/or that we'd still be able to discover deleted chats like we can find deleted emails in eDiscovery.
FYI: As noted in the April 19, 2022 post, the option to delete an entire chat thread was only available to Personal accounts.
Now it's available to Education and Home and Small Business too.
Still apparently not an option for GCC, GCC High, DOD, or other cloud instances, though.
sd adm Sometimes a colleague might send an inappropriate message and I would want to remove that from my screen permanently. Inappropriate could mean that it contains foul language, it might give a password or door code, it could contain unkind remarks about another co-worker, it could contain racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. content, or something else. It could even be an honest mistake, e.g. a typo that turns the intended innocent word into an offensive one or somebody using the wrong word because they don't understand its true meaning.
It should be possible to delete one or more individual messages from any given sender. At least they should disappear from my side of the chat - the sender might be notified that the message had been deleted.
DH-24 ,
(This is sd adm, my work email changed, but Tech Community doesn't allow you to transfer accounts unless you sign up with a personal email
).
I'm not arguing in favor of the merits of not being able to delete.
I agree with you & the other posters!
I just pointed out that per MS documentation, it is possible to delete chats, but only in Home & Small Business.
I further said the only justification I could imagine (corporate retention policies having precedence) didn't make sense on further consideration (the messages should still exist in the hidden Outlook folder for eDiscovery)
